Animating complex images, such as human or animal faces, that change frequently and subtly, is amongst the most difficult tasks that computer animators confront. Prior art techniques provide for the modelling of a face as a collection of polygons or bicubic patches, the shapes of which may be altered by control points. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,276,570 entitled "Method and Apparatus for Producing an Image of a Person's Face at a Different Age," to Burson et al. The face may then be changed by moving the control points. Further changes to the face, such as details that are not captured by the polygons or mesh, may be manually painted on the face using off the shelf painting software. This additional painting is a time consuming and tedious task.
One technique for assisting an animator to create faces entails storing a database of face positions and allowing the animator to blend selected face positions by selecting a weight for each position ("blended database entry"). Current software packages that implement this technique, however, tend to be relatively slow and have user interfaces that are not optimal. The present invention improves the art by providing a faster and more efficient blended database entry animation system in conjunction with an improved user interface.